Education platform Declara closes USD 9 million

Palo Alto, California-based online social learning platform, Declara has raised USD 9 million in Series A round, as reported by TechCrunch. The round was led by Linden Venture Fund and Singapore-based EDBI. The raised funds will be used to open an office in Singapore as well as extending its business operations in Asia.

The company is also having operations in Boise, Idaho and Mexico. It was launched in February 2012 by Co-Founder & CEO Ramona Pearson. Earlier, it had secured USD 16 million in Series A round and USD 5 million in Seed investment. Till date, including this round, the company has a total capital of USD 30 million.

GigaOm says: The company’s customers so far have included national agencies and organizations that are trying to connect large numbers of people for the purposes of educating one another. The company uses machine learning and semantic search techniques to learn how people learn and what they’re interested in, and then connect them with people and content accordingly. It calls its platform the CognitiveGraph.

For more information on Declara, check out Structure Show podcast interview with its founder and CEO Ramona Pierson (pictured above), or her Structure Data session below.

More from TechCrunch: Declara’s technology include customized learning tools for individual students by combining semantic search, predictive analytics, and machine learning to build a learning platform that it calls the “Cognitive Graph,” which looks at how users interact with data based on their Internet activity, including searches; interactions on social network; and content that they read. Then the platform creates a “learning map” with personalized course material for each person.

The company’s platform is currently used by several schools, universities, and organizations to supplement courses. These include Educational Services Australia, which uses Declara to help teachers to learn new skills; Snidicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), Mexico’s largest teacher union, which is using Declara to help train 1.6 million teachers and administrators; the University of Pennsylvania; and Genentech.